Deep Sky Atlas

My Own Personal Planetarium!

This star atlas was programmed a while back over many years and was a pet project
of mine. The goal was not to re-invent the wheel (there are plenty of
top-shelf star atlas applications out there already!), but more as a
learning experience to teach myself a bit more about astrometry as well
as the programming algorithms associated with astronomy. This
application is more of a beta or prototype than anything, however it is
more or less fully functional. The only glaring omission is a working
Print command. There is one in the code, but it does not work properly.
Everything else in the menus does function, but your mileage may vary.

DeepSkies is very basic electronic computational star (and deep sky!)
atlas. It displays a view of the skies from a database of 10,000+ deep
sky objects and 2.5+ million stars based on the following catalogs:

New General Catalog

Index Catalog

Bright Star Catalog V5

Hipparcos Catalog

Tycho-2 Catalog

and adjusts the display of the objects (which are all in J2000
coordinates) for:

proper motion

precession

It does not adjust for:

parallax

nutation

aberration

refraction

The features of this application include:

ability to load and save a particular map

ability to "GOTO" any celestial coordinates

a search command that looks through the above catalogs

rudimentary gridlines and constellation lines

ability to toggle various labels and lines

an eyepiece field of view display

observing logs (stored in plain text format)

ability to add custom objects

a load/save default settings feature

basic help with instructions

ability to display a legend to explain on screen symbols

I am currently working on a Version 2.0 of DeepSkies that will be
much more sophisticated - yet still simple. I would like my application
to emulate a digital version of Sky Atlas 2000.0 - not act as a virtual
space simulator like most of the current astronomy programs do. I like
the fact that my application displays a deep sky object as a square or
an ellipse, and it is up to you, the observer, to discern what it looks
like (as opposed to displaying a Hubble image of the object on the
map!).

This software is offered free of charge with no warranty given or
implied. Installation is simple:

download the dswin.zip file (63
MB) and extract it somewhere to your
computer

double click on dswin.exe to run it!

You can create a shortcut on your computer to the .exe file if you
wish. To run this application, you need a 32-bit version of Microsoft
Windows:

Windows NT (3.1, 3.5, 3.51, 4.0)

Windows 95/98/Me

Windows 2000/XP

Windows Vista/7/8/10 (use XP Compatiblity Mode)

If you find the application either useful or amusing, send me an
e-mail: rick@deepskies.com and let me know what you think! Stay tuned
for Version 2.0.... coming soon!